The Ongoing History of New Music, episode 1022: Connections 3

Alan Cross Corus Radio

September 19, 2024 9:48 am

It may not seem like it, but everything in this universe is connected in all kinds of unseen ways. Humans have always known that chaos is a capricious and fickle thing, something that can show up when you least expect it. I find this aspect of history fascinating.

There’s the butterfly effect, the concept that a butterfly flapping its wings in China will set off a complex domino effect in the atmosphere that somehow results in a low-pressure wave blasting from Africa across the Atlantic causing a hurricane in the Caribbean.

That doesn’t really happen, of course. It was a metaphor/thought experiment created by a meteorologist and mathematician named Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963 when he discovered that a minuscule change in atmospheric conditions—he ascribed a value as tiny as 0.000127—could make an enormous difference down the road …this shows why it’s so hard to forecast the weather. A little difference can add complexity and instability to a system.

Remember that Treehouse of Horror episode from The Simpsons where Homer accidentally turns a toaster into a time machine? He travels into the past where he manages to screw up the future multiple times by making the tiniest mistake.

This vignette was based on a 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury entitled A Sound of Thunder. A man named Eckels goes back in time and kills a dinosaur. When he returns to the present, everything is different.

We hear about “black swan” events, a random thing that no one expects or could have predicted, yet it happens. And suddenly, everything changes.

Covid-19 was an example of that. Whatever spawned the virus—bats, infected animals in a wet market, a lab leak—started as something very, very small but ended up changing the lives of virtually everyone on the planet.

We can also apply this sort of investigation to the world of music. If you pick a topic or thing, you can often trace it back to something that illustrates the wonderful and awful randomness of the universe.

This is another episode that I call “Connections.”

Songs heard on this show: